Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

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Master of the Abyss

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

"This man" Jonathan Lethem said, pointing to me at the rear of the room in which his Readercon Guest of Honor interview was taking place, "had a direct hookup thirty-five years ago to the outcome of the space agency. Astronauts driving cross-country in diapers to speed along a murder plot. The crazy collapse of it all." I waved an acknowledgement with an assumed indolence which George Plimpton might have envied. Thanks, Jonathan. Great being a visionary. You end up in the back of a room in which three hours later the annual Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Contest will be conducted. Visionary!

At the time (1968-1971) I was writing my three Crazy Astronaut novels (there were about ten short stories), I didn't feel like a visionary at all. What was going on, the human dehumanization of space, the asepsis of the overwhelming, seemed absolutely clear and so did the outcome. Any dummy could have seen this coming, I thought. The Apollo Program was oxymoronic; it was an exercise in institutionalized denial. Also it had been funded and propagandized by the government as a distraction from the increasingly unpleasant and unpopular business of Vietnam. When our Vietnam involvement inevitably ended, when the Moon had been "conquered", when the distractive purposes had been solved, the Moon was certain to be abandoned and Apollo would collapse. In thrall to the Government, it had been meant by the Government to be about power, not exploration. The astronauts had to know that too. They had to be a little crazy as they perceived that fundamental contradiction.

Seemed clear enough to me and overseas to J.,G. Ballard who was (in The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, "The Terminal Beach") working similar territory; the mad incapacity of our culture to deal with the maddening implication of uncontrollable technology. The increasing gap between human motive and sprawling technological capacity could lead to collective insanity. Certainly Ballard's "condensed novels" limned that, and in the colonies I was reaching the same conclusions in my humble work.

After Apollo 13, after Watergate, after the flight from Saigon, I made an assessment in an Afterword to the 1976 reissue of my 1972 novel, Revelations. Revelations was the middle novel of that Crazy Astronaut Trilogy ( The Falling Astronauts; Beyond Apollo) and in some ways the most ambitious, dragging in confrontational television as the laboratory for my crazy astronaut. (Paddy Chayefsky must have encountered this novel which was published five years before the release of Network.) This was how it looked to me 32 years ago:

"How right I was in seeing that the structure of the program and its administration would drive many astronauts crazy we have only been inferring in recent years . . . because I was right about that. I knew from the beginning that my insights were correct, I knew that the men going into those capsules, ostensibly as operators, actually as cargo, would be forced to come to terms with the devastating fact that they could serve only by being machinery and that many of them, sensitive and reflective in our better moments would wish them to be, could not easily deal with this. Only years later did we learn of the divorces, the breakdowns, the lurches into mysticism, the scattered children, the pain that the bureaucracy had inflicted on some of those astronauts . . . there is no percentage in this culture in trying to tell the truth for any reason although at the time I was writing these novels there was a certain amount of diversity permitted and I was making a fair living on advances . . ."

Forgive the self-pity (part of my working equipment at the time, I hope that time and larger difficulties have enabled its departure); this is not bad anticipatory insight. It took the two space shuttle disasters (explosion on takeoff, incineration upon re-entry) to completely abolish perception the space program's ad astra as having any competence, but the space shuttle program, expensive and close to useless, would have been a severe descent even without tragedy. Not only is it clear that there will be no peopled Moon landing within my expected lifetime, there is not likely to be such within the lifetime of anyone now on the planet.

The Apollo program, in the hands of a venal, cynical government, was made absurd. It did not want to be absurd, it had serious purposes, millions of dollars was budgeted for the public relations which would make clear how very serious it was. We were after all embarked upon the greatest of human odysseys, one which Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles had called the justification for our existence. That little clock which ticked inside us was our signal to carry to the stars. Kennedy had said, "We will go to the Moon." Agnew had said, "We Will Go To Mars." John Campbell had written in 1945: "First sale of Astounding on the Moon in 1960!" In the tent of our fathers, all mysteries were to be explained.

But meanwhile, "There is to be no cursing in space" Control advises the three astronauts in one of my earliest stories ("Triptych," 1969). "The transmission is on all the time, control your language." No cursing in space! If the War On Pornography was to be carried from the offices of the Citizens For Decent Literature to the spaceways, if the spaceways were an Interstate to the suburbs of the Moon, if the Reverend Donald Wildmon and his good citizens could sanitize the limitless, and if no one in the National Aeronautics and Space Agency or the United States Government could state that this was absurd...then the program was doomed. Devoid of humility or realism, it would end in an ash heap of motive. The astronauts and engineers trapped by this mad oxymoron would be either insensible or driven toward madness. Pass the diapers; pass the mysticism please. John Glenn went into space a second time at the age of 75 but he had nothing to say that time, either. That was perhaps the only way to deal with it: say nothing.

Perhaps my own problem was that I took my conclusion or anticipation to be obvious; it did not seem to me that any thoughtful science fiction writer (regardless of politics) could disagree. I learned otherwise when I wrote a mild editorial for the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America (in 1969 I was its volunteer editor), a callow version of the argument made (I hope) with somewhat more sophistication above. That editorial incited uniform loathing from those who chose to respond (I was accused of being opposed to the very concept of the exploration of space) and shortly thereafter I was sent on my way. (There are, I wrote ten years later, even greater humiliations than being thrown out of a volunteer job and science fiction, piece by piece, was eager to teach me all of them.) Particularly venomous was a writer employed by a contractor for the space agency who accused me of trying to get him fired. Joanna Russ, meanwhile, did not like my syntax or conjugation.

Well, all of this, even the cross-country diaper-wearer, was a long time ago. None of this really matters now and there will be no Mars landing for hundreds of years. (Eventually we will get there and everywhere else; I believe in Gordon R. Dickson's "Thousand-Year Look.") I wrote this because a friend, the Political Science Professor, asked "Why does your work, like Mailer's in the 60's and 70's, center on an apocalyptic outcome separating you from almost all Jewish writers of the time?" and when I answered "An apocalyptic outcome seemed obvious" someone else asked, "Why was it so obvious?"

I hastened therefore to answer. I am doing the best I can here, no less than our noble Vice President, to Serve The Nation.

—December 2008: New Jersey